Pottery In Australia Vol 35 No 1 Autumn 1996

Perhaps that's what my work is about - little by little,
cleaning up the anecdote.
In 1985 I experienced a kind of epiphany. Until then I
had been making domestic ware and thinking of each
piece (in the prevailing way) as individual, self sufficient.
But they weren't. In the same way that icebergs and lichens
conceal more than they show, the individual pots on the
production line were covering up a big secret when they
paraded independently in galleries and craft shops. Their
relationship to all the other pots in their production run
was the secret and the only one who knew about it was
me. Since then my work has focussed almost entirely on
functional pottery, the nature of its production and the
meaning of function.
The meaning changes over time as one constantly
renegotiates the importance of use/non use. At present
usefulness seems paramount - to quote John Perrault 1
'Divorcing crafts from use is dangerous. Use factors
control key aspects of form and meaning.'
But despite this emphasis on function, I pref er the term
domestic ware as it describes the site of use. It is that place
of everydayness, the last frontier of the true hero/ines.
Where there is still time to occasionally idle over life. To
reflect, to indulge in ' ... the slightly bored melancholy
which nurtures (our) imagination' 2
The very ordinariness of the site of so many of our social
rituals. They may not be the major dinner parties and large
family dinners of the past, but the shared cup of coffee
standing at the sink (or the lone cup for that matter), the
bowl of cereal filled and eaten while standing in the sun,
even the stacking of the dishwasher.
Amanda Lohrey suggests 3
'The politics of the kitchen may be the only remaining
place where the individual is able to assume some control
over his/her environment.'
Why just last night a Dutch friend dropped by and we
had the leftover chicken livers on black bread toast "just
like my Dutch grandmother used to do" and ate them off
the square tenmoku plates and drank a good red wine.
And when I washed up this morning I handled the plates
and remembered the conversation and thought of the
fragment of additional history that those plates had
acquired.
This capacity that pottery has to insinuate itself into
peoples' lives is a great strength (and perhaps a great
weakness as it removes it from the eye of the critic who is
necessary for its survival as a considered art practice). The
discourse between maker and user changes emphasis in
the trajectory from concept to incorporation in the
domestic milieu. The initial stage is maker dominant, the
final stage is user dominant. If the work is sold through
outlets, the gallery or shop owner intercepts that trajectory
and reinvents the work by the way in which they talk
about it and display it. If the work is sold through
exhibition then I can exercise greater control over the
interpretations placed on it. There, however it is still
subject to the response of critics or reviewers. In a lot of
respects they are accomplices in the "making" of the work
and "remake" it when they write about it.
There is also the consideration of what actually happens
when use is lost in pottery making. This can happen by the
user's act of putting a pot "up with the good china" or by
the artist consciously denying use in the making. There has
been a great deal of this latter sort of ceramic work around
over the last ten or fifteeen years - 'vessels' I think they
were usually called. I found myself drawn to those that
made very strong reference to the usable.
A series called "Memories of the Domestic Life " '
occupied me for several years where the resonance
between use/non-use, intimacy/ distance and present/past
was examined using both functional and non functional
pots. The non functional pieces (which were a kind of
fictional artifact) were made with soft crumbling surfaces
and were dry glazed, the functional pots (actual artifacts)
were plain white porcelain.
But through all this period the production continued.
Like the beat of one's heart, it was necessary for the life of
the imagination.
The idea of the work dispersing, yet still existing
conceptually was an increasing obsession.
An exhibition in 1995 at the Performance Space curated
by Gillian McCracken was an opportunity to work further
with that idea. In a collaboration with a filmmaker and a
musician 4 I produced a piece that spoke not only about its
wholeness and subsequent fragmentation, but also about
these bowls being the only remnant of my performance for
one. A kind of souvenir, a concrete record of that act of
making. All the bowls at first glance seemed identical but
were actually different in several ways. They were sold
separately, and so each (or each set) was destined to be
"completed" differently by its new owner. Thus the
variation inherent in them 5 would be amplified by the way
in which they would be used.
There was also another kind of difference and that was
of a temporal nature.
As one works on making large numbers of the "same"
form and doesn't work to a ruler (as I didn't) the forms
change day by day in subtle and unanticipated ways. It
was possible to tell the pots made on one day from
another. They were marked by time and conversly marked
time. I had always been aware that the forms of my
production had changed over the years but this was a new
experience to see it over such a short time.
This has led to another exploration - the production of
the one kind of form made in one continuous sequence
and exhibited as a whole -but with no attempt to make
them seem the same. Just the same action. They are
explorations of the relationship between form and time.
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24 POTTERY IN AUSTRALIA + ISSUE 35/ 1 AUTUMN 1996